Thursday, June 05, 2008

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 06:05:28 +0000
The Enterprising Moms Business Summit is to inspire, motivate and provide the business resources for moms to achieve their dreams. They provide inspirational mom entrepreneurs and expert guest speakers to provide insight in to the world of entrepreneurship. The Event also provides a platform for moms to showcase their businesses and share information with one ...]

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST
One of the best funded virtualization vendors, Ensim offers several classes of products that cater to different hosting needs. The company's products are geared toward both smaller hosts that rent space on a dedicated or shared server and larger Web hosting firms ..

Maybe you have heard about the domain name registrar

RegisterFly. Maybe you have domains with them already.

We have and we have plenty. It is most disheartening what

has been in the news about them lately, and this video

can make you see what you could expect with them…

Next thing you will want to check out is the disk space and bandwidth limitations. If your just starting your blog out - do you have enough room to grow? If your blog is already established then do they have enough disk space and bandwidth to support you for a long period of time.

“We’re committed to making things easy for our customers,” said Daniel Hanczyc, VP of marketing at Infrenion. “WHMCS being the complete all-in-one client management system will make life easier for many of our reseller partners. We are pleased to be able to offer our customers more features at reduced prices.”

The latest buzz in the datacenter & server markets these days can be summed up as: Woodcrest.

Woodcrest is Intel's code-name for their newest Dual Core Xeon processor - which boasts two CPU cores on 1 chip, 4MB of shared cache, a claim of 40% better performance with a 40% reduction in power used. Wow. To every datacenter-centered person that is a dream come true. With the rising power & cooling costs, increasing performance and reducing power is essential.

With the latest reviews on hardware websites showing that these new chips blow away the competition in almost every area, we decided to use the new Woodcrest processor in a new reseller web hosting server that we're bringing online.

The first job was finding a Woodcrest process that would provide enough power & not bankrupt us (some of these Woodcrest CPUs are in the $1000 arena!)... we chose the Intel 5130 Dual Core Xeon. Then the going got tough.

MotherBoardAll of the Woodcrest motherboards that we could find were in the $300 - $500 range. We chose the Tyan S5372 i5000VS dual Woodcrest motherboard - it looked like a good choice.

CASEWe use 2U cases from an excellent provider called ServerCase.com Luckily we keep spare cases because they ship from California and it can take up to a week to get a case to us on the East Coast.

THE RESULTSThanks to 3 day shipping methods, our parts were delivered very quickly. We started to build the server and ran into 3 issues:Problem 1) The new motherboards screw holes didn't line up with the 2U ATX case from ServerCase.com .. .there were 3 brackets coming up from the bottom of the case for screws, but there were no holes on the motherboard. Needless to say that is bad.... what to do? We don't want to wait to buy another case and delay the building process. Solution: We used a drill to drill through the bottom of the case and remove the 3 offending metal brackets

Problem 2) The motherboard requires a EPS12V / SSI (24 + 8) power supply - our spares were all 24 + 4... damn. There's no way around this, we zip back over to ServerCase.com and order 2x (always need a spare, right?) I-Star Dual xeon power supplies & that is resolved

Problem 3) The 2U case requires special mounting brackets for a Dual Xeon motherboard... back to ServerCase.com to order the correct parts.

Hooray... uh oh?Finally at this point everything looks good! The server is built (running very cool - Intel delivered on their low-power promise!), harddrives are installed, RAID card works, RAM is recognized, and life is good in server land.... right? Well, the last step is to go into the bios and change the "After Power Failure" setting to "Turn On"... this will allow us to reboot the server using our APC remote control strips. We go into the BIOS, change the setting, save the settings & restart.

We then pull out the power and plug it back in but the "After Power Failure" setting doesn't work! That is an essential feature for a remote controlled server. Panicking, we rush to Tyan's website to check for BIOS updates. Phew! There have already been 2 updates for this BIOS so surely they must have fixed the issue. We flash the BIOS to the latest 1.3 version and test it and it still doesn't work. note about the motherboard flashing: Tyan says that it is required to boot into MSDOS with no HIMEM loaded but give no details on how to do this. It took us an hour or two of consulting people and websites to finally figure it out... thanks for the great instructions Tyan]

So the next step is to call Tyan's technical support (emailing their support was a maze of getting the proper subject and that was just plain old confusing).... to their credit they picked up right away and were very helpful. They setup the motherboard in their labs and tested it out and verified that the feature worked for them. Hmm... their official response is that the power supply that we're using is not supported. We pay $35 to do an RMA (over night, thankfully) in hopes that we somehow have a defective motherboard. The new motherboard arrives the next day from California and the problem still persists.

Now, I would accept the "unsupported power supply" theory, except when we use the CLEAR CMOS jumper on the motherboard to clear the BIOS settings, the next time we plug the power in, the system turns on automatically. That's right. If you clear the BIOS settings via the Jumper on the motherboard and plug the power back in, it will automatically turn on - but after that, even if you change the setting in the BIOS to "Turn On", it will not turn on!. That tells us that the motherboard & power supply together are in-fact physically capable of turning on after the power is plugged back in, it is simply a bug somewhere (either in hardware or software) that won't let it happen with our 'unsupported power supply'. Hopefully someone from Tyan will read this and look into this further. FYI: The power supply that we're using is an I-Star TC-2U40 (400W Quiet 20/24+8+4pin power supply)]

update - 9/30/2006 - Tyan issued bios version 1.04, we had hoped that this would address the problem, but it did not.

Follow-Up & ResultsAside from the lack of ability to turn on after a power failure, the server is running very well - temperatures are low, performance is high & there has been no weird behavior or freezing. we fully tested the CPU & RAM before-hand to ensure that there were no problems with these parts]

With just a little creativity your web stats can help you turn your web hosting site into a high traffic goldmine for your hosting business.

hostgator offers linux hosting only(even though they are expected to start
windows hosting in the near future). All their packages come with all the
features needed for a serious website. Baby and Swamp packages allow unlimited
domains(add on), which makes a lot of sense if you have multiple websites. They
use cPanel, which is the best control panel around. You get Fantastico script
installer which will install most of the popular open source scripts with few
clicks.

They support PHP4 & 5, SSH, Cron jobs, Python, Ruby On Rails etc. Also, all the
packages include enough POP3 accounts(20 for Hatchling and unlimited for
others).

hostgator host their sites on top-of-the-line Dual Xeon servers in their data
centers at Dallas. The data centers are well equipped and connects to 10
backbone providers. They offer 99.9% uptime Guarantee which is the industry
standard.

We started realtime testing of hostgator uptime on Feb 2008. The test is done on
a site hosted with hostgator, using a third party uptime monitor service. The
result after one week shows 99.78% uptime for our test site hosted with
hostgator.

While this is slightly less than the assure 99.9%, it is the BEST performance
out of top 4 hosts tested. There has never been a single case of site being down
for more than 3 minutes at a stretch. hostgator indeed lived up to their
reputation.